Nile Shadows jq-3

by Edward Whittemore

  That's right, and more so on some occasions than others. The weather seems to affect it, like an old wound. When it gets very dark out you begin to feel this stiffness at the base of your skull, and pretty soon it sneaks up toward your eyes, a sort of creeping paralysis of the mind, and drink seems to be the only way to waylay it.

  Would you like a drink? asked Cohen.

  Don't mind if I do, now that you mention it.

  Cohen reached into a cupboard and brought out a bottle and a glass.

  Is arak all right?

  Thanks. Just by itself is fine.

  Cohen poured and placed the bottle on a table beside Joe.

  An Irish Gulbenkian, murmured Cohen. That's remarkable.

  Joe raised his eyebrows as he sipped, his face lighting up with a kind of hope.

  Do you think so? Still, we're much better at wishing and dreaming for things than at having them happen.

  Like most people, I suppose.

  Then you're not really soliciting charitable contributions for Armenian refugees from Asia Minor?

  Well I'm doing that too in a way, over the long haul, but I admit tonight it was just a bit of amiable subterfuge meant to get me in the door. Cover, Liffy calls it. Secret agents are always using one kind of cover or another, according to him. Again, like most people. But you used the word remarkable, and that's true, that's what they were all right, all three of them. Strongbow, old Menelik, your great-grandfather Cohen. Just a remarkable triumvirate back when they were young, before they went their separate ways. Back when they were about your age, it must have been.

  Joe sipped again, his face thoughtful.

  In those days, he said, those three friends used to get together every Sunday afternoon in a cheap Arab restaurant they'd found for themselves on the shores of the Nile, a pleasant filthy place they'd taken a liking to, and there they'd feast and drink and carry on, telling each other all the things they were going to do in this world. And when the afternoon was coming to an end and they were as drunk as lords, over the restaurant railing they'd go, just leaping into the Nile to drift away on the great swirling currents with contented smiles on their faces, enjoying the last good rays of the sun and belching and bubbling and snoozing ever so happily, just effortlessly pissing away their troubles so to speak, lords of the noble Nile for a moment in their youths. . . .

  Cohen's long thin hands drew graceful shapes in the air. He smiled and shook his head.

  I'm sorry but you must be mistaken, he said. You must have three other men in mind, because I know for a fact my great-grandfather always dined at home on Sunday. It was a family tradition.

  ***

  That's right, said Joe, he never did all of it. Cohen started out in the restaurant with his two friends, but already being a family man, he didn't spend the afternoon carousing there but went home to have Sunday dinner with his fine young wife and young son, as you say. Then when Sunday dinner was over he'd suggest a pleasant walk down by the river, and in the course of this pleasant stroll the family would pass a felluca tied up, ready for hire, and the son would beg for a little sail and Cohen would kindly agree, and the whole family would climb on board for a lovely cruise in the late afternoon.

  Well it would just so happen that while they were out there sailing on the Nile, Cohen would spot a couple of belching bubbling bodies floating by on the great river, his good friends Strongbow and Ziwar dead drunk on the currents of time, and the felluca would take a turn or two and Cohen would pluck his friends out of the water and lay them out on the floorboards to sleep it off. And a good thing it was, too, for if Cohen hadn't done that then Strongbow and Ziwar might have gone right on floating down the Nile and out to sea and been lost to history forever, which would have been a loss for all of us. So that's how those Sundays worked and that was Cohen's Sunday role, an essential one, because without him those other two wouldn't have been around to see Monday. . . . Your great-grandfather. A faithful friend.

  He was a good family man, murmured Cohen.

  Oh he was definitely that, said Joe, like all the men of the Cairo Cohens. And he was also on his pious way to becoming the patriarch of his clan as well as a hugely wealthy man, after first being viewed as crazy. For it seems he had two mysterious dreams one night, the first depicting seven fat cattle coming up out of the Nile and being eaten by seven lean cattle that followed them, and then right on top of that another dream, this time of seven full ears of corn being devoured by seven lean ears.

  Cohen smiled, relaxing and enjoying himself.

  Do I hear an echo from the Bible? he asked.

  And so you do, replied Joe, and of course messages from God were often said twice in those days so nobody would get them wrong. Well knowing the good book as your great-grandfather did and the history of his people in Egypt and all, and being himself in Egypt, he didn't need a prophet to tell him what his two dreams were all about. So the very next morning this Cohen put aside the lenses of his trade and headed out into the fields of Egypt to buy grain. He'd decided to give up grinding glass, you see, in favor of grinding grain.

  Cohen drew some shapes in the air, a quizzical expression coming over his face.

  Right, continued Joe. And at the time there happened to be plenty of grain in Egypt, yet here was this Cohen going deeper and deeper into debt to buy up all he could and store it away in warehouses. And he went on doing that for seven years and naturally everybody in the country got into the habit of calling him Crazy Cohen, for who in his right mind would fill up more and more warehouses with grain when all the fields were heaped with it already?

  Well obviously no one who's sane, that's who. Obviously only a Crazy Cohen, a ward of God who'd been snatching messages out of thin air, thinking he'd been chosen to hear them. But he carried on in his delusions, Crazy Cohen did, never forgetting for a moment his back-to-back dreams in sevens, and lo and behold and surprise of surprises, all at once there was a terrible turn to the harvests in Egypt that wouldn't let up, with the result that almost no grain grew in Egypt for another seven whole years. And during that second stretch of seven years, the lean stretch, all that stood between Egypt and starvation was Crazy Cohen and his demented pious foresight, and his warehouses.

  Joe leaned back and smiled.

  Chosen, it seems, he was. And thus by keeping the faith and keeping his mind on my namesake, he made a stupendous fortune. . . . A pious gambler. Your great-grandfather.

  Cohen nodded thoughtfully.

  Your name is Joseph?

  More commonly, Joe. Also O'Sullivan Beare. But my coat isn't many-colored, as you can see.

  Cohen nodded again.

  Do you also have eleven brothers, Joe?

  More, I'm afraid. Or at least I used to. Over the years a lot of them seem to have fallen off roofs in the New World, while drunk. Thought they were reaching for the stars, don't you know. Queer place, the New World. Some people actually believe it's that.

  Cohen gazed at Joe and drew a circle in the air.

  So history comes around, he said, and that much is history. But I don't see what any of it has to do with us.

  Right, said Joe. History hiding its real intent behind a cover, like secret agents and most people. Now let's just recall those three young gents who were such close friends in the nineteenth century, said Strongbow and Ziwar and Cohen. Of the three of them, Ziwar was a Christian and Cohen was a Jew, and Strongbow, although born an Englishman, was on his way to becoming a Moslem holy man. So already, to those of a religious bent, we have something of a representative gathering for this part of the world.

  Cohen laughed. Friendly fellow, thought Joe, and so far so good. He poured more arak for himself as Cohen gestured at the buffers and grinding wheels in the workshop.

  Religion aside, do these tools speak of great wealth to you?

  No they do not, said Joe. But there used to be a saying in Cairo, I'm told, which explains that. A little madness is a dangerous thing. Remember the Cohens. . . . Which saying was as accurate as ca
n be, for what happened in Cairo in those days was that old Crazy Cohen's son, who was partly practical and only a little mad and therefore known as Half-Crazy Cohen, what happened was that Half-Crazy went on to spend the entire family fortune while in the company of a great friend of his named Ahmad and two beautiful young women known as the Sisters. Some of the fortune went to the racetracks and the casinos, and some of it for champagne to fill alabaster cups of pure moonlight when the four of them were out carousing on the Nile, so long ago. . . . Such madcap living by your grandfather in his youth, in other words, said Half-Crazy Cohen, that all the Cohen fortune got spent. So that later when your father came of age he had to find a trade to support himself, and what better trade to turn to than the one that got the Cohens started in Egypt in the first place? Lenses. Nothing grand about it but honest work all the same, so back your father came to this very house where your great-grandfather had started and resurrected a faded old sign in the shape of a pair of giant spectacles, a symbol of eyes that can see, the sign we find hanging out front tonight. . . . And that, I believe, is the tale of the Cairo Cohens over the course of four generations and more than a century, stated in its essentials. Rags to riches to rags it goes, and whoever said we all begin the same and end the same knew what he was talking about.

  Cohen smiled, opening a silver cigarette case. He offered it to Joe, who took a cigarette and struck a match for both of them.

  Are you also an itinerant Irish historian, Joe?

  More so on some occasions than others, but it's really the present that interests me, so let's head that way and consider the time when your father was a young man in Cairo, before the First World War. Now at this point old Menelik Ziwar was living in retirement in a crypt beneath a public garden beside the Nile, using a gigantic cork-lined sarcophagus as his bedroom, where he was known to be at home on Sunday afternoons, as they used to say, meaning he was ready to welcome friends and serve them a bracing cup of underground tea. And since so few people had ever heard of old Menelik to begin with, we shouldn't be surprised to find that most of his guests were the children of former friends.

  A suggestion of a frown flickered in Cohen's face, even though he was still smiling. Joe pretended not to notice it.

  So for one, said Joe, there was the grandson of his old friend Crazy Cohen, your father. And there was the son of an old friend and fellow dragoman-in-arms named Ahmad, the son also Ahmad. Then there was the son of the great explorer Strongbow, the child born to the Jewish shepherdess Strongbow married late in life, young Stern. And of course the Sisters from their strange houseboat, older than the other guests and the only ones who had known Menelik in his prime, long-term residents on the Nile who never wanted to miss a good thing near the river and seldom did. And that was the inner circle gathered around old Menelik's cork-lined sarcophagus on Sunday afternoons back before the First World War.

  There were some others who dropped in now and then, but we don't have to concern ourselves with them tonight.

  For the first time Cohen stopped smiling. But his composure was still remarkable and Joe admired him for it. Stern's influence, thought Joe. There's no mistaking it.

  And after these friends had tipped away their tea, Joe went on, they would unpack their musical instruments and get ready for the weekly concert that was so dear to the heart of old Menelik. For as that wise living mummy used to say in his five-thousand-year-old tomb—I wouldn't, dream of trying to pass eternity without the music of life. Eternity, old Menelik used to say, just doesn't work without music.

  Examine anyone's notion of the great beyond, even the vaguest, and you'll hear melodious strings soaring in the background, or at least a lute being plucked. . . . Thus the concerts those friends always put on for old Menelik when they came to call, Stern quite naturally the leader. Stern tuning his violin and using his old Morse-code key to tap on Menelik's sarcophagus and get everyone's attention, old Menelik himself ecstatic at the prospect, the music soaring as everyone joined in their separate moods. . . . Stern and Ahmad and your father and the Sisters. . . . Your father thoughtful as he played his oboe, that very oboe we now see resting in a place of honor in its case on the wall behind you.

  Joe paused.

  But your father never had a chance to teach you to play it, did he, David?

  No, said Cohen. He never did.

  ***

  Joe sipped arak. Cohen was still as calm as ever, so calm Joe was inevitably reminded of Stern. And in fact from the very moment he had entered the house Joe had felt Stern's invisible presence, which was heartening to him. It meant Stern was loved and cared for here and Joe was grateful for that. But he still had to make it possible for Cohen to trust him enough to talk about Stern, and that wouldn't be easy because Cohen would never say anything that might bring the least bit of harm to Stern. Joe was certain of that and it only increased his respect for Cohen.

  Well, he thought, I've made what connections I can with the past and now there's nothing for it but to bring us up to the here and the now and pray he'll tell me some little thing. Pray is all.

  Joe reached down for the cylindrical leather case he had brought with him. He unzipped the case and let it fall away, holding up Ahmad's spyglass and extending it to full length.

  Cohen, puzzled, stared at the spyglass and then at Joe.

  ***

  And now, said Joe, we come to another excellent and stirring device, also made here in Cohen's Optiks.

  Used for enlargement or its opposite, and also useful for just plain seeing things. . . . I hope.

  Joe put the large end of the spyglass, the wrong end, to his eye. He gazed through it at Cohen.

  It's true, he said, that the world looks exceptionally neat and tidy this way. Ever wondered why?

  Why? asked Cohen.

  Because small things always look tidy. That's why we try so hard to reduce things and put them in categories and give them labels, so we can pretend we know them and they won't bother us. Order, it's called, the explanation or an explanation, the reason for and the reason why. It's comforting to us, naturally it is, who wants to live with chaos all the time? . . . Well not much of anyone in fact, because it suggests we're not in charge and can't understand everything. So we have this little game we play, rather like children lining up their toys on a rainy afternoon and giving each toy a name, and then calling them by these made-up names and telling them what they are and why. . . . And sometimes we pretend we can do that with life, lining up people as it suits us and telling ourselves what they do and calling it history.

  Like children with their toys, making it more comfortable for ourselves by pretending we order the chaos when we hand out names.

  Joe lowered the spyglass, collapsed it, put it back in its leather case.

  Know what, David?

  What?

  Life isn't like that. It's just not like that at all and neither is Stern and what he does. A label just won't do for Stern. Ten or twenty contradictory adjectives might be accurate, but how much would that help us to place him?

  Joe shook his head.

  Not much at all. Because the truth is Stern's as complex and chaotic as life itself. And he's human and he's going to die.

  Joe stared hard at Cohen. He smiled.

  And yet I know there'll never be an end to him.

  ***

  Joe looked down at the spyglass on the floor.

  Good workmanship, that. Made by your father for his friend Ahmad. The same Ahmad who is now a forgotten desk clerk at a Biblical ruin called the Hotel Babylon.

  Cohen stared down at the spyglass, confused, unsure of himself.

  But why. . . ?

  Why did your father make it for Ahmad, you mean? Because Ahmad was the very king of the boulevards in those days, and a king should have the wherewithal to survey his kingdom. So the spyglass was a joke at the time, but now Ahmad uses the spyglass when he goes up to the roof of the Hotel Babylon on Saturday evenings to look for his lost homeland, like the Jews of old. And he takes
his trombone with him and he wears his only suit, a flower in his buttonhole and a smudge of polish on his shoes and his dyed red hair slicked down with water, and he peers through his precious spyglass and pretends he can see the great city where he once ruled as king, alone there in the night of his captivity, a desperately yearning and haunted captive of the past.

  Cohen lowered his eyes. Joe spoke very softly.

  Your father died in the First World War, I know that. He was in the British army. The campaign to take Palestine?

  Yes, whispered Cohen.

  A young man, then. About your age?

  Yes. It was a freakish accident. The Turks had evacuated Jerusalem but a deserter was hiding in the hills and fired off a round. One shot and then he threw up his rifle and surrendered. An illiterate man, a peasant. He didn't know his army had already left the city.

  Your father and Stern were the same age?

  Yes.

  And after that Stern saw to your upbringing, is that it?

  Cohen raised his eyes and gazed at Joe.

  Why do you say that?

  Because that's the kind of thing Stern would do. It's Stern's way.

  Cohen dropped his gaze. He spoke with great feeling.

  If it hadn't been for him we wouldn't have been able to stay together. He supported my mother and made it possible for us to keep the shop, and then when my mother died he took care of Anna's and my education. . . . Just everything.

  Cohen picked up the silver cigarette case.

  This was my father's. He had it with him the day he was killed. Stern gave it to me when I was a child. I don't know how he ever recovered it.

  Cohen held out the case to Joe. There was Hebrew lettering engraved in the corner.

  It was a present from Stern to my father on the day he enlisted. Do you read Hebrew?

  No, but I can read that. Life, or your father's first name. Or both.

  Cohen took back the case. He looked at Joe uneasily.

  Shouldn't you tell me why you're here?

  Yes I should, said Joe, and I think I ought to start at the beginning, back when I was much younger than you are and didn't know the smallest part of what you know about the world. Back when Stern and I first met in a mythical city.